Terra Australis Incognita

Terra Australis Incognita
Author: Miriam Estensen
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2006-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1741760860

In October 1606, the great Spanish navigator Luis Vaes de Torres took two vessels through the waters that divide the land masses of New Guinea and Australia. In a journey of great adventure, courage and hardship, he was the first European to sail through today's Torres Strait and very possibly the first European to sight the east coast of Australia. Terra Australis Incognita focuses new light on the Spanish voyages of discovery that sailed from South America into the unknown south western Pacific in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Crossing the planet's largest ocean in small wooden ships with rudimentary navigation, these Spanish conquistadors were in search of the legendary Great South Land first imagined by the ancient Greeks. This is a story of passionate beliefs, of high hopes and catastrophic failures, of attempted colonies that ended in death and disaster, of violent confrontations and tentative friendship with indigenous people, of a fierce clash of cultures, and relentless ambition in search of the gold of King Solomon's Ophir. It is also the story of the visionary adventurer Quiros who planned a New Jerusalem in today's Vanuatu, the ruthless woman governor Dona Isabel, the Solomon Islander chief Bilebanarra who was a friend of the Spaniards and, of course, the great leader of men Luis Vaes de Torres. Terra Australis Incognita is a thoroughly researched, lucidly written and unique narrative on the little known history of the great Spanish explorations of the Pacific Ocean.

Incognita

Incognita
Author: Granville Allen Mawer
Publisher: Arden
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-05-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781925984453

Medieval Europeans imagined the southern hemisphere in terms of folklore, biblical revelation and geographical theory, and the eager expectation of the discovery of rich and fertile landmasses. This book tells the story of invention, purposeful deception and self-deception, and of the discoverers who bit by bit brought the reality home.

Terra Incognita

Terra Incognita
Author: Ian Goldin
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 547
Release: 2020-08-27
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1473570123

'Amazing. It would be my desert island choice' Martin Rees 'Fascinating, beautiful, alarming and revelatory use of mapping and infographics' Stephen Fry on EarthTime maps 'An indispensable read' Arianna Huffington From the global impact of the Coronavirus to exploring the vast spread of the Australian bushfires, join authors Ian Goldin and Robert Muggah as they trace the ways in which our world has changed and the ways in which it will continue to change over the next hundred years. Map-making is an ancient impulse. From the moment homo sapiens learnt to communicate we have used them to make sense of our surroundings. But as Albert Einstein once said, 'you can't use old maps to explore a new world.' And now, when the world is changing faster than ever before, our old maps are no longer fit for purpose. Welcome to Terra Incognita. Based on decades of research, and combining mesmerising, state-of-the-art satellite maps with enlightening and passionately argued analysis, Ian and Robert chart humanity's impact on the planet, and the ways in which we can make a real impact to save it, and to thrive as a species. Learn about: fires in the arctic; the impact of sea level rise on cities around the world; the truth about immigration - and why fears in the West are a myth; the counter-intuitive future of population rise; the miracles of health and education that are waiting around the corner, and the reality about inequality, and how we end it. The book traces the paths of peoples, cities, wars, climates and technologies, all on a global scale. Full of facts that will confound you, inform you, and ultimately empower you, Terra Incognita guides readers to a new place of understanding, rather than to a physical location.

Terra Incognita

Terra Incognita
Author: Sara Wheeler
Publisher: Modern Library
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2014-10-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 080415242X

It is the coldest, windiest, driest place on earth, an icy desert of unearthly beauty and stubborn impenetrability. For centuries, Antarctica has captured the imagination of our greatest scientists and explorers, lingering in the spirit long after their return. Shackleton called it "the last great journey"; for Apsley Cherry-Garrard it was the worst journey in the world. This is a book about the call of the wild and the response of the spirit to a country that exists perhaps most vividly in the mind. Sara Wheeler spent seven months in Antarctica, living with its scientists and dreamers. No book is more true to the spirit of that continent--beguiling, enchanted and vast beyond the furthest reaches of our imagination. Chosen by Beryl Bainbridge and John Major as one of the best books of the year, recommended by the editors of Entertainment Weekly and the Chicago Tribune, one of the Seattle Times's top ten travel books of the year, Terra Incognita is a classic of polar literature.

Land of Wondrous Cold

Land of Wondrous Cold
Author: Gillen D’Arcy Wood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0691201684

A gripping history of the polar continent, from the great discoveries of the nineteenth century to modern scientific breakthroughs Antarctica, the ice kingdom hosting the South Pole, looms large in the human imagination. The secrets of this vast frozen desert have long tempted explorers, but its brutal climate and glacial shores notoriously resist human intrusion. Land of Wondrous Cold tells a gripping story of the pioneering nineteenth-century voyages, when British, French, and American commanders raced to penetrate Antarctica’s glacial rim for unknown lands beyond. These intrepid Victorian explorers—James Ross, Dumont D’Urville, and Charles Wilkes—laid the foundation for our current understanding of Terra Australis Incognita. Today, the white continent poses new challenges, as scientists race to uncover Earth’s climate history, which is recorded in the south polar ice and ocean floor, and to monitor the increasing instability of the Antarctic ice cap, which threatens to inundate coastal cities worldwide. Interweaving the breakthrough research of the modern Ocean Drilling Program with the dramatic discovery tales of its Victorian forerunners, Gillen D’Arcy Wood describes Antarctica’s role in a planetary drama of plate tectonics, climate change, and species evolution stretching back more than thirty million years. An original, multifaceted portrait of the polar continent emerges, illuminating our profound connection to Antarctica in its past, present, and future incarnations. A deep-time history of monumental scale, Land of Wondrous Cold brings the remotest of worlds within close reach—an Antarctica vital to both planetary history and human fortunes.

Terra Australis: Text Classics

Terra Australis: Text Classics
Author: Matthew Flinders
Publisher: Text Publishing
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2012-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1921961015

In this edited selection of his journals, Matthew Flinders, Australia’s greatest navigator and the man who named our island continent, describes in captivating detail his epic mission to map our shores between 1796 and 1803.

Below the Convergence

Below the Convergence
Author: Alan Gurney
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2007-02-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780393329049

This wonderfully written book tells of the first Herculean expeditions to Antarctica, from astronomer Edmond Halley's 1699 voyage in the Paramore to the sealer John Balleny's 1839 excursion in the Eliza Scott, all in search of land, glory, fur, science, and profit. Life was harsh: crews had poor provisions and inadequate clothing, and scurvy was a constant threat. With unreliable--often homemade--charts, these intrepid explorers sailed in the stormy waters of the Southern Ocean below the Convergence, that sea frontier marking the boundary between the freezing Antarctic waters and the warmer sub-Antarctic seas. These men were the first to discover and exploit a new continent, which was not the verdant southern island they had imagined but an inhospitable expanse of rock and ice, ringed by pack ice and icebergs: Antarctica.

The Mapping of Terra Australis

The Mapping of Terra Australis
Author: Robert Clancy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 198
Release: 1995
Genre: Reference
ISBN:

A guide to early printed maps of Australia, Antarctica and the South Pacific.

European Perceptions of Terra Australis

European Perceptions of Terra Australis
Author: Dr Alfred Hiatt
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2013-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1409482901

Terra Australis - the southern land - was one of the most widespread concepts in European geography from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, although the notion of a land mass in the southern seas had been prevalent since classical antiquity. Despite this fact, there has been relatively little sustained scholarly work on European concepts of Terra Australis or the intellectual background to European voyages of discovery and exploration to Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through interdisciplinary scholarly contributions, ranging across history, the visual arts, literature and popular culture, this volume considers the continuities and discontinuities between the imagined space of Terra Australis and its subsequent manifestation. It will shed new light on familiar texts, people and events - such as the Dutch and French explorations of Australia, the Batavia shipwreck and the Baudin expedition - by setting them in unexpected contexts and alongside unfamiliar texts and people. The book will be of interest to, among others, intellectual and cultural historians, literary scholars, historians of cartography, the visual arts, women's and post-colonial studies.

Voyages of Discovery ...

Voyages of Discovery ...
Author: James Cook
Publisher:
Total Pages: 502
Release: 1906
Genre: Antarctica
ISBN:

A narrative of Cook's three voyages to the Pacific and Australasia : the first voyage (in "Endeavour") and the second (in "Resolution" and "Adventure") are largely retold in the third person, with some quotations from Cook's own writings (p. 1-228); the third voyage (in "Resolution" and "Discovery") consists of copious sections of Cook's own account plus accounts by Captains King and Clerke, in addition to the third-person narrative (p. 229-479).